Thank you for reading this section, our small team truly appreciates every contribution made by our community: feature requests, bug reports, and especially pull requests!. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to our Core team on Slack.

It is important to understand how our codebases are organized and why. Directus is decoupled, which means that the Application and API have separate codebases within two different GitHub repositories. Let's go through each of our main repositories in more detail.

An admin GUI for managing Directus API instances. It allows humans to interact with the API, and wraps the API with a friendly user interface so that anyone can manage content through their web browser.

This is what you're looking at right now. It stores all of the Documentation for Directus in markdown files that are easily editable by the community. Our web Docs are automatically generated from these files using VuePress.

This is the code used to generate the official Docker images for Directus 7. These images are available through our Docker Hub and can be accessed via: docker pull directus/app and docker pull directus/api... the Dockerized combined build for Directus 7 is coming soon.

The main thing to be aware of when submitting a new Directus feature request, is our rule on edge-cases. To keep the Directus core codebase as clean and simple as possible we will only consider adding features that at least 80% of our user-base will use. If we feel that less than 80% of our users will find the feature valuable then we will not implement it. Instead, those edge-case features should be added as Extensions.

If your new feature is specific to the App (the part you see and use in the browser) then you'll want to submit here. Otherwise, if it is an API feature you can submit here. If you're not sure or the feature is more conceptual or global, then submit it to the App and we'll organize it for you!

Before adding a new request, you should also first search to see if it has already been submitted. All feature requests should include the enhancement label, so you can filter by that. And remember to also check closed issues since your feature might have already been submitted in the past and either rejected or already implemented.

Also, if you want to see the most highly requested features you can sort by :+1: (the thumbs-up emoji).

If your idea passes the 80/20 test and has not already been submitted, then we'd love to hear it! Submit a new issue using the Feature Request template and be sure to include the enhancement label. It's important to completely fill our the template with as much useful information as possible so that we can properly review your request. If you have screenshots, designs, code samples, or any other helpful assets be sure to include those too!

You can also vote on existing feature requests. As mentioned above, the :+1: and :-1: are used for sorting, so adding one of these reactions to the GitHub issue will cast a vote that helps us better identify the most desired (or undesired) features. And remember to add a comment if you have additional thoughts to help clarify or improve the request.

Our core team is always working hard to implement the most highly-requested community features, but we're a small team. If you need the feature faster than we can provide it, or simply want to help improve the Directus platform, we'd love to receive a pull-request from you!

Before we get into the full-blown "proper" way to do a pull request, let's quickly cover an easier method you can use for small fixes. This way is especailly useful for fixing quick typos in the docs, but is not as safe for code changes since it bypasses validation and linting.

We like to keep a tight flow when working with GitHub to make sure we have a clear history and accountability of what changes were made and when. Working with Git, and especially the GitHub specific features like forking and creating pull requests, can be quite daunting for new users.

To help you out in your Git(Hub) adventures, we've put together the (fairly standard) flow of contributing to an open source repo.

Whether you're working on the API or the App, you will need to have your own copy of the codebase to work on. Head to the repo of the project you want to help out with and hit the Fork button. This will create a full copy of the whole project for you on your own account.

To work on this copy, you can install the project locally according to the normal installation instructions, substituting the name directus with the name of your github account.

If you're doing more work than just a tiny fix, it's a good idea to keep your fork up to date with the "live" or upstream repo. This is the main Directus repo that contains the latest code. If you don't keep your fork up to date with the upstream one, you'll run into conflicts pretty fast. These conflicts will arise when you made a change in a file that changed in the upstream repo in the meantime.

When using git on the command line, you often pull and push to origin. You might have seen this term in certain commands, like

git push origin master

or

git pull origin new-feature

In this case, the word origin is refered to as a remote. It's basically nothing more than a name for the full git url you cloned the project from:

git push origin master

is equal to

git push git@github.com:username/repo.git master

A local git repo can have multiple remotes. While it's not very common to push your code to multiple repo's, it's very useful when working on open source projects. It allows you to add the upstream repo as another remote, making it possible to fetch the latest changes straight into your local project.

When you want to update your fork with the latest changes from the upstream project, you first have to fetch all the (new) branches and commits by running

git fetch upstream

When all the changes are fetched, you can checkout the branch you want to update and merge in the changes.

git checkout master
git rebase upstream/master

If you haven't made any commits on the branch you're updating, git will update your branch without complaints. If you have created commits in the meantime, git will step by step apply all the commits from upstream and try to add in the commit you made in the meantime. It is very plausible that conflicts arise at this stage. When you've changed something that also changed on the upstream, git requires you to resolve the conflict yourself before being able to move on.

Whenever you begin working on a bugfix or new feature, make sure to create a new branch. This makes sure that your changes are organized and separated from the master branch, so you can submit and manage your pull requests for separate fixes/features more easily.

Make sure to check if your branch is up to date with the master branch of upstream. An outdated branch makes it near impossible for the maintainers of Directus to check and review the pull request and will most likely result in a delayed merge.

Once you've commited and pushed all the changes on your branch to your fork on GitHub, head over to GitHub, select your branch and hit the pull request button.

You can still push new commits to a pull request that already has been opened. This way, you can fix certain comments reviewers might have left.

TIP

Please allow the maintainers of upstream to push commits to your fork by leaving the "Allow edits from maintainers" option turned on. This allows the maintainers of Directus to help out in your PR!